Online education startup Treehouse has raised $7 million in fresh funding from Kaplan, Social + Capital Partnership and others. The money will be used to grow the Portland company’s team, which now consists of 52 employees. Total funding now stands at $12.6 million.

Treehouse is competing in a super-hot area of online education, teaching students new skills in the technology arena. It offers step-by-step video courses and training exercises in areas like Web design, Ruby on Rails, PHP and iOS development. At this point, the company, which moved to Portland last year, boasts 25,000 active students.

Others in the space include Lynda.com, Udacity and CodeAcademy, as well as Andy Sack’s CodeFellows program which offers in-person technology courses.

Ryan Carson

Having Kaplan in its corner certainly will help Treehouse. In a statement, Kate Eberle Walker of Kaplan Ventures noted: “We believe that Treehouse has the market-leading offering for delivering targeted, in-demand technology skills training at a low cost, and we are thrilled to support their growth.”

As part of its new offering, Treehouse today is announcing a new 6-month program designed to train high school students for new technology jobs that pay in the range of $30,000 to $40,000 per year.

“We’re thrilled about the next year at Treehouse,” said CEO Ryan Carson in a release. “We’ve got an amazing lineup of new courses on the way and some really exciting new features to help students learn technology more effectively than ever before.”

John Cook is GeekWire's co-founder and editor, a veteran reporter and the longest-serving journalist on the Pacific Northwest tech startup beat. Follow him @johnhcook and email john@geekwire.com.